


Lost Violent Souls: Shadow Hunters

by mabus101



Series: Lost Violent Souls [2]
Category: Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-07 09:02:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10356891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mabus101/pseuds/mabus101
Summary: The Collapse is well underway, and the countdown to the War of Power has begun.





	1. The Beginning of the End

"...My friends, you know that none of this comes from a place of malice. I know that you are pained by many of the disasters that have befallen us--as am I. But the fact remains that they are disasters stemming from our own decisions and choice.

"Shai'tan did not carry out Ca'tel'alu's dream murders or Kerunnos' eco-terrorism. He did not engineer the rise of shaje duels or zara. He certainly did not entice the Fifth Dominion to engage in a brutal power-grab over the Fourth. We did those things. We chose them. If there is an enemy, it is ourselves.

"For good or evil, the approach of oblivion empowers us. Our actions will have no consequences beyond our generation. The end of the existing order--the end of _everything_ \--is not to be feared. It is freedom.

"Good night, my friends. Good night. The countdown has begun. This is Elan Morin Tedronai, Farshadar Cuen, First Among Servants...signing off."

Lews shut off the feed. "This is what we have to work with. The other six Rods of the Dominions are distracted, the security force is up to its ears in violent crime, and the Hall of the Servants is too stunned to act. What do we do?"

Tel Janin's garb shifted into a security uniform. "There's only one thing we can afford to do. We overthrow him."

"Obviously," Duram Laddel said, combing fingers through his greying hair. "But as horrific as he is, some people will support him. Those who will follow any authority, however vile. Those who profit from his doctrine of infinite freedom. And, most importantly, those who are stunned and confused into inaction. We have to reduce the numbers of that last category as much as possible."

"For whatever it's worth, Uncle Duram," Ilyena mused, "the others too, if for no other reason than to reduce his support."

"I think there's only one thing we can do," Barid said, wiping his forehead. "As Rod of the First Dominion, I note that we have a quorum for trial. I propose that we try Elan Morin Tedronai in absentia for treason and remove him from the High Seat."

Lillen stared at him. "Here? In a random building in Tel'aran'rhiod? with a handful of Aes Sedai? What possible legitimacy can this maneuver have?"

"The legitimacy of necessity," Ilyena said. "Whether he understands it or not, Elan just declared war on all of us. He has to be stopped. As Rod of the Seventh Dominion, I concur."

Lews Therin hesitated. "Ilyena, both you and your uncle have been First Among Servants before. If either of you takes office, some of those we must impress will believe our actions are a grab for power. Barid, I nominate you as emergency leader."

"What? Lews, why not you? You're best qualified." Why wasn't he jumping at the position? Barid Bel had always wanted it.

"Perhaps," Lews said. "So people say. Which means if they see me handing off power to you, it'll ensure they don't think either of us are just trying to seize it."

"Lews Therin," Tel Janin growled, "there's a time for political maneuvering and then there's a time for war. You don't want people to see a power grab? Fine. I nominate you. We need the best leader possible, no matter what anyone else thinks."

"He's right," Lillen said. "If you mean to beat Elan, we need you to take the reins."

"Agreed," Duram said. "Regardless of public opinion, you're the best chance we have. We'll publish that we all supported you. If enough people dissent we can hold a special election later."

"If I must," Lews said finally. "Lillen, I know you caught Mierin. I wish things had been otherwise. I charged you with finding the moghedien among us and you did. There will be others. Are you up to the task?"

Lillen nodded curtly. "You trust all these, then?"

"If anyone here was working for the Shadow, they'd move now. I trust them. I have to." Lews set himself. "As Rod of the Second Dominion, I concur. Barid, will you prosecute?"

"I will. Lews, will you defend?"

"I will." Light, it was really about to begin. "Will the rest of you hear us and judge?"

"We will."

"You have heard Elan's broadcast. Would anyone choose to hear it again?" Barid adopted a dramatic pose, perhaps unconsciously.

No one moved, save for a few cursory shakes of the head.

"I contend that we have a confession and clear involvement in treason. Lews, do you want to present a defense? I rest."

Lews sighed. The evidence was damning, but Elan had been his and Barid's teacher and friend. "The broadcast could be a fraud."

"You saw the voiceprint analysis, Lews. That isn't plausible to me. Anyone?" Again, no one moved.

"Elan could be under Compulsion." It was a final effort. Elan's mental state fluctuated, sometimes wildly, and depression made people especially vulnerable. But--

"Well, we all know the Compulsion protocols, Lews. Aside from not using lethal force save in extreme self-defense, we must attempt to apprehend him as if he were adjudged guilty so that he can be examined. Is that acceptable to you?"

"It is," Lews said softly.

"Do I have a verdict?" Barid would play out the forms to the end, despite Tel Janin's glares.

"Guilty," Tel said flatly.

"Guilty." "Guilty." "Guilty," Lillen said last, with a sad frown.

"Elan Morin Tedronai is hereby stripped of titles unless and until he is cured of any Compulsion he may be under. Presuming no mental illness or Compulsion, the sentence is life imprisonment without parole." Barid glanced at Lews. They had followed the forms, however barely. "I appoint Lews Therin Telamon provisionally to the High Seat. Does anyone object?" Lillen opened her mouth, then closed it without speaking.

They were committed. And never mind the forms, Lews didn't believe Elan would go quietly for testing. They would have to kill him.

Lews Therin wept.


	2. Entangled

_the beginning_

Mierin woke up choking and reached for the One Power, but nothing was there. Not the Power, not even the "arm" to reach for it with. It was as if she had been severed and worse. A hatch popped, and fluid began to drain from around her. She sat up, still choking, and prised at the tube mask that covered her face, pulling out the long strands that had invaded her mouth and nose.

She was naked. She was flabby. She was pale. She was sitting in waist-deep water, and as her vision cleared she saw electrical arcs in the distance and realized that her pod was one of millions in a vast deep array of them.

Mierin fumbled at her arms, at her back, at her skull. She was bald, and thick cables pierced her skin everywhere. The thickest was sunk into the back of her skull. With a moan of agony and despair, she pulled at this and felt it disengage. The cable ended in a spike that had somehow been sunk deep into her brain. As she stared, it retracted into the pod, and with a series of tiny explosions the cables began to detach from her all over, in series.

She pushed herself up weakly, and as she did so some kind of robotic drone flew up in front of her to stare with camera eyes. Electricity crackled from it, and the bottom of her pod dropped out from under her, sending her spiraling down a long sloping ramp in semidarkness until she dropped into a pool of water far below.

Something stepped up to her, a humanoid machine that crushed a skull beneath its foot as it moved, its eyes glaring red. Desperately Mierin clawed for the Power-- _tried_ to claw, at least--and found nothing. Then there was a boom-crack! The metallic figure fell, and a short-haired woman in a tight-fitting jumpsuit stepped up to her from the shadows. _Lillen._ It was Lillen Moiral.

"Come with me if you want to live," Lillen said.

Mierin couldn't remember how she knew Lillen. She just did. "Who are you? Is this...real? No One Power, no dreamworld, just this?"

Lillen shook her head firmly. "No, Mierin. This is a nightmare. Ca'tel'alu created it. You don't have to remember. Just believe. _This is not real._ "

Mierin clenched her fists tight. Not real. Not real. Almost...she could almost remember what was real.

"This is not home, Mierin. Find home. Find yourself. Your real body is asleep in V'Saine. Feel it."

Memory seeped through the cracks. Truth. She was Mierin Eronaile Aes Sedai. She was hunting down a serial killer. Ca'tel'alu. He killed people in their dreams. He was almost untouchable. But not to her, and not to Lillen.

Was he?

"I burned him," Mierin remembered. "I channeled Fire like a blast furnace at him. And he Healed himself! Lillen, that's impossible!" The machine landscape began to blur and dissipate.

Lillen nodded. "He did. And then he stepped out of Tel'aran'rhiod without a Gateway. I don't know how he does what he does." She was standing on a beach. Machines rose behind her, wheezing steam and clacking clockwork, but not the vast array that Mierin had endured. The implants melted away. Her hair grew out. Her body toned itself. "Much better," Lillen said with a grin. "We could take a break."

Mierin clothed herself hastily. "I'm flattered, but not interested," she warned. "What is this place?"

Lillen shook her head. "Rhuidean," she said. The word meant nothing to Mierin; it had no roots she could tease out. A neologism, perhaps, or an acronym. "An old project," Lillen added. "Not important now."

Mierin nodded. "Agreed. How does he do what he does? Can we actually stop him? Those are the important questions." Though she had already filed away Lillen's project to find out about later.

"You forgot one. Should we discuss this here, or in the physical world? I'm thinking the latter. Wake up." And Lillen vanished.

Mierin made a face. Ca'tel'alu had a vivid imagination in any case, but these nightmares were so elaborate that it was hard to credit that he was simply making them up. Was he finding them in the media somewhere? Remembering them from past lives? Or was there some other source she hadn't even thought of?

Lillen thought she was the master here, and Mierin her prize pupil. Well, perhaps she was, for the moment, but Mierin had no intention of letting it remain that way. Lillen was fairly weak in the Power, and strength in the Power had some bearing here at least.

Mierin stalked forward into the churning machinery. What was this place? Mechanism gave way to electronics, and then...what _was_ at the center of this place? A growth of tiny crystal columns like a mushroom ring, alternately flickering and surging with saidar. She backed away cautiously. Ter'angreal sometimes reacted differently in the World of Dreams than in the real world, and she could feel a...pressure on her thoughts.

A vision opened in the sky. Lews Therin dueled with a short-haired woman while Elan stood in the background, watching. They were playing at Swords, but with blades conjured with the One Power. What silliness!

Another window opened. Ishar Morrad stood, his hands outstretched, before a monstrous figure on a slab. Lightning crackled, and he cried out, "It's alive!" Mierin could see the figure only dimly, but it would tower over the tallest man.

A third vision. A large man, black hair streaked with white, reflected over and over again in a hall of mirrors, but the images were all behaving differently. One of them looked her in the eyes and began to laugh.

Mierin shook her head. She could make nothing of the images, and the last was unsettling. She had seen enough. She closed her eyes and willed herself awake.

***

She sat up queasily. Lillen and Elan had begun talking while she still slept. "Have a care," Elan said, noticing her. "Ca'tel'alu is devious. Lillen was just telling me of something he said to her."

"May I hear?" Mierin wiped a string of saliva from the corner of her mouth. Of _course_ Lillen had let her rest her head in the other woman's lap! Elan didn't seem to notice her irritation.

"Ca'tel'alu said that he and several other terrorists and criminals were all actually working for one person," Elan said. "He even gave a name: Farshadar Cuen."

"Shadow'sheart?" Mierin's mouth twisted. "Does he know nothing of proper grammar?"

"It may be chosen and constructed to give a false impression," Elan said.

"He mentioned several names," Lillen said. "Balthamel and Ashareth. Kerunnos. And the ever-mysterious AM, surprise surprise."

"That makes no sense," Mierin protested. "AM is running a Compulsion slave ring, obviously for profit, while Ca'tel'alu kills for his deranged pleasure. Balthamel and Ashareth are agitators for more technological funding to achieve transcendance, while Kerunnos leads a group of Ogier eco-terrorists who hate technology and the One Power. They've got nothing in common."

"They all wish to knock society from its foundations," Elan said. "Perhaps this 'Farshadar Cuen' doesn't care how, only that it be done."

"I suppose," Mierin said begrudgingly. "And Ca'tel'alu just let this slip?"

"He was gloating," Lillen said, glancing out the window. 

Mierin followed her gaze. They were higher than the highest of normal buildings by now. This was the Skybridge, a work of genius by Letan Obral Denethyst. Laced with monomolecular cuendillar fibers, it reached all the way into geosynchronous orbit. Its lift cars brought traffic swiftly up to the station that launched vessels bound for the lunar colony of New M'Jinn. It could be damaged, but never destroyed, not completely. How that squared with the Wheel of Time, Mierin couldn't have said.

"The spider's web tightens and the cable is cut," fell from Mierin's mouth instead. "The arrow is deflected and the swords caught. The bridge falls like thunder, and the peaks of doom rise." She clapped a hand to her mouth. "Did I just--?"

"Can't be," Lillen said, her eyes wide and twitching back and forth. "The Skybridge can't be cut. It's laced with heartstone. If that was a Foretelling it means something else."

"Prophecy is rarely straightforward," Elan said nonchalantly. "But I daresay Lillen is right. The Skybridge is as invulnerable an artifact as humans can create. I must admit I've never heard you Foretell before."

"I've managed twice before," Mierin said. "My meditation hypothesis seems to be correct, but I find it extremely hard to enter the right state of mind. And now I just...slip into it." She grimaced. "Maybe it's related to the World of Dreams."

"We were just at Rhuidean," Lillen mentioned. "It's been known to induce visions of the future or the past."

"Lillen," Elan asked, "what is Rhuidean?"

"My accidental brainchild," Lillen said. "An idea I had for a quantum computer when I was a child. It draws on the indeterminacy of Tel'aran'rhiod and calculates with the One Power. And I set the project aside years ago. I thought it would show results after I died. Or never. Clearly I was wrong."

"And all these years I thought you were just a businesswoman," Elan said, smiling faintly. "Clearly you're far more than that."

"I'm a ranking expert in the study of the Unseen World, Elan," Lillen grumbled. "It bothers me you don't expect me to do anything but push papers and shovel money."

"I apologize for underestimating you," Elan said. "Can you tell me anything about what Tel'aran'rhiod is like in space?" He gestured at the slowly-darkening windows, where the stars were coming out.

"Dangerous," Lillen warned, "unless you know _exactly_ what you're doing. New M'Jinn has been around long enough to be stable, and that's about the only place that has. Lose focus, and you suffocate, if you're lucky. I haven't tried it and don't intend to."

Mierin sighed. It sounded like a viable method of space exploration to her. You needed a clear head, that was all. She began, "Surely with expert control, you could--" But that was when the Ogier entered the cabin.

Mierin was used to seeing Ogier fumble about in spaces designed for humans, and why not? Humans were _small_ , to them. But now that she thought about it, she had never seen a clumsy Ogier. Certainly she'd never seen an Ogier bang her head on the doorway, then stumble when she tried to correct. "Olana daughter of Tifa daughter of Jhera," the woman said, and flashed her security badge. "Hello, Elan Morin. May I assume we're among friends?"

Elan glanced thoughtfully at Mierin. "For the most part, Olana. There are things it might be better not to bring up just yet, for security reasons."

"Hmm," Olana rumbled, her gaze passing briefly over Mierin--appreciatively?--before she added, "Of course, Elan Morin. I will be discreet." Mierin supposed there had to be kinky Ogier who were into humans, but what were the odds? Just her luck.

Lillen gavs Olana a tight grin and a shrug, as if sharing her assessment of Mierin, but Olana missed it entirely. Difference in human and Ogier body language, perhaps? Well, if they started fighting over her, she'd inform them that she loved one man, and only one.

"Olana," Elan asked, "can you give us your assessment on the criminal body thief calling themselves AM?"

Olana's grin seemed to split her face wide open. "We've found him at last. Ared Mosinel, formerly of the Incastar. He'll never escape us now." And then, she gave Elan a curious little wink.

Elan grew fidgety. "I...I see how he's escaped us for so long. Their records systems don't interface with ours."

"Backward fools," Mierin muttered. For some reason, Olana harumphed at that. Something odd had to be going on here, something she was missing. "Shall we spring the trap on him?" she suggested.

"Yes," Olana said. "I believe it's time."


End file.
